(HOST) Commentator Bill Mares has been thinking about how often big money leads to conservative politics.
(MARES) In recent weeks, articles in The New Yorker and the NY Times have described the back-stage power and ambitions of the billionaire Koch Industries and how they are bank-rolling some of the Tea Party movement’s caustic anti-government and anti-Obama ideology. Coincidentally I’ve been reading two books with similar themes. One is set in a fictional Vermont and the other in a very real Texas.
Sinclair Lewis the Nobel Prize winner, while living in Barnard in the mid-1930’s wrote a novel called IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. It describes the fictional Presidential campaign of a populist Senator, part Huey Long, part Adolph Hitler. He wins with a mixture of Wall Street money, racist appeals to the little guy, cash promises to all families and a corps of storm troopers called Minute Men. The new President immediately suspends the Constitution and sets up a dictatorship akin to what the Nazis had just done in Germany. Fear and order rule.
Lewis’ hero is a crusty, courageous newspaper editor named Doremus Jessup. Jessup escapes from a concentration camp and joins an underground which forms an alliance with members of a government-in-exile in Canada to eventually regain control of the high-jacked nation. The book is an engaging mélange of satire, Lewis’ own political philosophy and a chilling, if sometimes implausible, narrative.
The other volume is set in my childhood home of Texas. THE BIG RICH by Bryan Burroughs documents the rise of the Texas oil industry and especially the lives of four eventual billionaires – Hugh Roy Cullen, Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison and H.L. Hunt.
Since my father worked in the petro-chemical industry, the lives and antics of Texas oilmen were almost daily fare. In their exuberant strutting lives, they gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "conspicuous consumption." They became the models for Jett Rink in Edna Ferber’s best-seller GIANT, and J.R. Ewing in "Dallas." Their braggadocio and the self-righteousness with which they adorned their oil field luck was almost comical. Far more menacing was their politics. Their support for right-wing, anti-government policies began in the 1930’s. They became great fans and friends of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, until Edward R. Murrow’s documentary and Senate censure popped his balloon of hate.
They underwrote groups like the Minute Women, who saw "Reds" in every school and on every library shelf, and a "liberal" was as detestible to them as a "communist." H. L. Hunt himself wrote a novel extolling plutocracy, where the most votes would go to the oldest, the wealthiest and the most ambitious.
Mark Twain once said, "History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Today, Alaska has become the new Texas of anti-government rage fueled by economic insecurity and simple enemies, energized by the nattering nabobs of negativism on Fox News.
Ironically, in Hunt’s novel the perfect society would prohibit political discussion from TV, from radio and from all meetings of more than 200. With political rhetoric limited to print, society would insulate the impressionable masses from demagoguery.
Take that! Hannity, Limbaugh and Beck!